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Wikipedia and language choice

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55 messages over 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 
SamD
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United States
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 Message 49 of 55
08 December 2006 at 7:23am | IP Logged 
The question of whether a language is useful is particularly thorny. Ari is especially perceptive in saying that Spanish is more useful to an American than a Swede.

If you must think of languages as useful on a worldwide basis, perhaps the most important consideration is number of speakers. The next thing I would look at is the number of literate speakers. The next consideration might well be the number of people learning that language as a second or foreign language; this would give a sense of how international that language is.

The problem is that we all live and operate in some country or other and speak some language or other as our first language. The languages that are most useful to me in my life in the USA may not be as useful to some other people here.

Of course, we can't always predict which languages will come in handy or where life will take us. I could end up falling in love with someone who speaks an obscure language or get a great job offer that might make learning some previously unstudied language immensely practical. Any list of the most useful languages then becomes irrelevant.


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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
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 Message 50 of 55
08 December 2006 at 9:00am | IP Logged 
The thought of letting the number of articles in Wiki decide which language you should study is amusing, but just too far out to be taken seriously. However the different versions of Wiki are certainly useful for those who study some of the 'smaller' languages. For instance the Romanian Wiki is one of the few sources where the special Romanian letters are constistently used, and in the Greek Wiki you find the accents that often are absent from other sources on the internet. There are Wikis for even very 'small' languages if they are spoken by people who can afford computers (whereas the hundreds of languages spoken in a single valley in New Guinea probably won't get their own Wiki), though the number of articles will often be quite limited. And you can use the Wikis as a source of information about the specific vocabularies for different areas of knowledge, though there may themes that are not covered in a certain Wiki. So Wiki does have an indirect influence on the choices of language by making it easier to find material in some languages.



Edited by Iversen on 08 December 2006 at 9:03am
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RogueRook
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
N/A
Joined 6843 days ago
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Studies: Hungarian, Turkish

 
 Message 51 of 55
08 December 2006 at 10:28am | IP Logged 
Captain Haddock wrote:


If you want to have deep conversations on complicated subjects with those same people, you'll probably have to learn German.



I second that. Please don't be deceived by by the Germans posting here like Marc, Zorndyke and myself. Our command of English is definitely not representative of the average German.

Overall knowledge of English is rather low among the elderly and slightly better among the younger people. But it usually amounts to little more than Bad Simple English. It is not like say Norway, where a man around 50 once gave me precise directions to the next ATM. All in flawless American English with this slight and very charming Scandinavian accent.

This is unlikely to happen in Germany.

So it is still worthwhile to learn German.
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Andy_Liu
Triglot
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Hong Kong
leibby.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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Speaks: Mandarin, Cantonese*, EnglishC2
Studies: French

 
 Message 52 of 55
09 December 2006 at 10:46am | IP Logged 
nhk9 wrote:

If you block people from using wikipedias, wouldn't that actually defeat the purpose of wikipedia. Afterall it should tolerate different points of view. I don't know how you would determine whether or not articles or of better quality etc. But what I think is that if they are educated enough about how wikipedia works, they could perhaps contribute to that community. Yes they would have different political ideas, but if you ban them, you would have a systematic bias in your articles, which is no good.

But then there's the problem of lack of free speech in mainland PRC, so until they have that, what they write maybe influenced by the local laws of that regime. Hopefully things will get better. Sorry for digressing.


It is always better if Chinese wikipedia (along with all other wikimedia sites) AREN'T banned at all. First, obviously, many mainland Chinese cannot visit those sites in a normal way. Only cleverer users can resort to using proxy. Second, because of the ban, some mirror sites flourished - as you would understand, because some articles are purely non-political. But the worst thing is many people (those able to visit Chinese wikipedia) simply LIFT the entire content from the site and claim the copied material itself contains "GFDL" information, "copyrights", or whatever.

One hand, it does allow the flow of at least some content (like copying my own Chinese-translation work from English wikipedia); but this doesn't respect me and wikipedia. Above all, any typos or inaccuracies were copied altogether (because of the difficulty of internet access). This will mislead many readers of the mirror sites. One typical example is Baidu Baike.
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Ari
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Norway
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 Message 53 of 55
09 December 2006 at 5:25pm | IP Logged 
SamD wrote:
The question of whether a language is useful is particularly thorny. Ari is especially perceptive in saying that Spanish is more useful to an American than a Swede.

If you must think of languages as useful on a worldwide basis, perhaps the most important consideration is number of speakers. The next thing I would look at is the number of literate speakers. The next consideration might well be the number of people learning that language as a second or foreign language; this would give a sense of how international that language is.

The problem is that we all live and operate in some country or other and speak some language or other as our first language. The languages that are most useful to me in my life in the USA may not be as useful to some other people here.

Of course, we can't always predict which languages will come in handy or where life will take us. I could end up falling in love with someone who speaks an obscure language or get a great job offer that might make learning some previously unstudied language immensely practical. Any list of the most useful languages then becomes irrelevant.



Oh, I was never really thinking that the list would be useful. Both that list and the Wikipedia list are more or less brain play, as I see it. Actually, the ranking would probably not be very interesting (and who would let outside factors decide which language to spend hundreds or thousands of hours of one's life learning?), but I for one would find the numbers all the more interesting. I'd be very interested in knowing how many people in the world I can communicate with. And, even on a small level, it'd be a spur to learning new languages. "Hurrah, now that I know X, I can speak with Y million more people!"

Meh, never mind. It was just a thought. Oh, and I have actually no idea whatsoever of the English level of Germans, I just grabbed for an example of a language with many speakers, most of whom know English. I thought Germans had a reputation of speaking good English? Anyway, I'm completely ignorant as to geography and spread of languages, so I'm thankful for all the enlightenment I can get :)
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jeff_lindqvist
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SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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 Message 54 of 55
09 December 2006 at 6:21pm | IP Logged 
There are many posts in this thread and I haven't read them in detail. We should perhaps not base our decision on the number of speakers or the number Wikipedia pages, but a thought struck me - close to what SamD mentioned:

Quote:
The next consideration might well be the number of people learning that language as a second or foreign language; this would give a sense of how international that language is.


A "useful" language would probably be one that's official/spoken/taught in many countries. Wikipedia has a list of official languages:

51 countries: English
31 countries: French
26 countries: Arabic
22 countries: Spanish
10 countries: Portuguese
7 countries: German
6 countries: Italian
5 countries: Dutch
4 countries: Croatian, Russian, Turkish
3 countries: Chinese, Hungarian, Korean, Malay, Persian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovene, Tamil, Swahili, Swazi, Urdu
2 countries: Albanian, Aymara, Bengali, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Quechua, Slovak, Swedish, Tajik
1 country: numerous languages
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Timbaland
Newbie
United States
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36 posts - 41 votes
Speaks: English*

 
 Message 55 of 55
09 December 2006 at 6:53pm | IP Logged 
If I did not speak English, it would likely be high on my list of languages to learn.


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